命運自選台English film review 急!!

HE is no darling of the critics, but Adam Sandler’s apparently “low-rent” films pack the audiences in almost every time. Expect his new film Click to be no exception.

The story is a pretty simple one: hard-working Jewish architect Michael Newman (Adam Sandler) has a totally adorable wife Donna (Kate Beckinsale) and two lovely and bright young kids. Michael is striving awfully hard to advance in his career and not doing a very good job at what we now quaintly call “work/life balance”, allowing his family’s planned 4th of July weekend camping trip to be trumped by a new project at work from his manipulative boss.

Michael is full of rage at the world in general and constantly irritated by the electronic gadgets in his house, which will not work. He seeks a “fix it”, a “universal remote” that will operate everything (metaphorically fixing his life as well). On a late night emergency trip to mega-store Bed, Bath & Beyond, he stumbles across mad scientist cum warehouseman Morty (Christopher Walken, this time in benign crazy form) who gives him a remote control that “is not returnable”.

But this is no ordinary remote: it not only operates electronic equipment, but turns the sound down on people talking, pauses action, and intuits what the user wants from life allowing them to skip all the tedious and painful parts.
The time-poor and stressed Michael uses this with wild abandon, becoming increasingly “remote” from his family, including his warm and loving parents, gleefully played by Henry Winkler and Julie Kavner. In true Hollywood fashion this all comes to rebound badly on Michael Newman and – surprise, surprise – he learns a valuable lesson.

Despite the obvious narrative, we are treated to running sexual gags with Newman’s dogs, gross stereotypes about Arab and Japanese businessmen, oversexed friends, lots of kicking people in their testicles, and even a sci-fi leap into the future with clever lines about Michael Jackson.

Director Frank Coraci (who also directed Sandler in The Waterboy and The Wedding Singer) keeps the action flowing in this charming film about appreciating life. We have seen it all before, notably in Frank Capra’s classic It’s a Wonderful Life and more recently in The Family Man starring Nicholas Cage. But the plot works again due to good jokes, a warm heart and excellent performances.

As in most Sandler films there are numerous Jewish references – in Click his on-screen mother refers to his penis as a “shmeckel” and the family cemetery has gravestones with prominent Magen Davids on them – contributing to Sandler’s reputation as one of most viewed secular Americanised Jews in contemporary film.

Click is currently screening nationally.

Click

BY ROGER EBERT / June 23, 2006

Scrooge was granted visions of Christmas Past and Christmas Future, and reformed his life. What happens to Adam Sandler in "Click" is like what happened to Scrooge, except with a lot more Christmases. He needs more than one lesson and he gets more than one lesson. Way more.

In "Being There," the hero Chance has spent all of his life watching television. When he wanders out to freedom and is threatened on the street, he clicks a TV remote control to get another channel. In "Click," Sandler plays Michael, an architect who is given a universal remote that's truly Universal. With it, he can take control of his life: freeze a scene, fast-forward, reverse, mute the sound, select the chapters of his choice and even witness his parents at the moment of his conception (that's, of course, in the "Making of" documentary).

The movie is being sold as a comedy, but you know what? This isn't funny. Yes, there are some laughs, as when he finds he can turn the dog's barking up and down, or play around with the settings for hue and contrast, or when he discovers the picture-in-picture feature that allows him to watch the ballgame no matter what else is going on around him. But the movie essentially involves a workaholic who uses the universal remote to skip over all the bad stuff in his life and discovers in the process that he is missing life itself. Take away the gimmick of the universal remote, and this is what a lot of us do, and it's sad.

It's not just sad, it's brutal. There's an undercurrent of cold, detached cruelty in the way Michael uses the magical device. He turns off the volume during an argument with his wife. He fast-forwards through a boring family dinner, and later through foreplay. He skips ahead to avoid a bad cold. He jumps to the chapter where he gets a promotion. Eventually, he realizes the family dog has died and been replaced by another, his kids have grown up, his wife is married to someone else, and he weighs 400 pounds. It happened while he wasn't paying attention.

Like many other Sandler movies, this one lingers studiously over bodily functions. After losing enormous amount of weight, for example, Michael plays with a big flap of loose skin around his stomach, plopping it up and down long after any possible audience curiosity has been satisfied. During an argument with his boss (David Hasselhoff), he freeze-frames the boss, jumps on his desk and farts. When he puts his boss back on "play," the boss inexplicably decides his secretary has put feces in his salad. Anyone who can't tell poop from lettuce doesn't deserve to be a senior partner. They teach you that in business school.

Michael is surrounded by patient and saintly people. His wife, Donna (Kate Beckinsale), loves him but despairs of reaching him. She has that standard wifely role of complaining when he has to work late and can't be at the swimming meet/Fourth of July party, etc. Michael's parents (Henry Winkler and Julie Kavner) are sweet and loving but kvetch too much and talk too slowly, so Michael zaps right through the time he has remaining with them.

I am not sure if this story device could possibly have been made funny. It could have been elevated into a metaphysical adventure, as in "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," or made to generate a series of paradoxes, as in "Being John Malkovich," but "Click" stays resolutely at Level 1 -- the tiresome explication of the basic premise. Once we get the idea, there are no more surprises, only variations on the first one.